


Art and science

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [14]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Cat eating discussion, Drama, Espionage, Friendship, Gen, Mid-Movie Spoilers, Mistakes Are Made, Spoilers, When Bob met Giles, it's for science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 00:14:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13306329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: A certain scientist is invited around to Elisa’s place to check on the creature, and meets a certain artist.





	Art and science

The man carrying the ID tags of Dr. Robert Hofftstetler looked up at the ramshackle cinema-tenement. While he watched, its illuminations switched on for the evening, lighting up its name: THE ORPHEUM.

As an espionage agent himself, he considered a flat in a cinema an excellent idea. It gave anyone a reason to come by, exchange information in the cinema, leave. But the note Elisa had slipped to him had given her floor and flat number. It would be hard to smuggle what he'd come to see into the picture show. He had agreed to come by and see if the water-creature was doing all right while Elisa kept it. He wondered, again, who Elisa was working for.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, starting to grow cold. The lights of THE ORPHEUM looked inviting. And for a while, he could be who he really was. Not Dr. Robert Hofftstetler, but Dimitri. Someone who hoped, despite everything he’d done, he was a good man.

From a curved window up top, a slim figure waved at him. Dimitri went up the rickety outside stairs, knocked on the door there. It cracked open a touch, then opened fully. Elisa, revealed, looked tired, but neat as ever, in a cardigan and skirt. She gestured him inside. He entered, dutifully removing his hat. Down a peeling, leak-patterned hallway, Elisa unlocked a second door.

As she did, soft music poured from a phonograph, the crooning of Juliette Gréco. Suddenly, Dimitri thought he knew who Elisa worked for. The French.  If this was so, everything about her made sense: how she carried herself, her flashes of charm, her ruthless timing. Her real name was probably Claudine or Amélie or Hortense _._ Dimitri uttered every politeness while wondering what had led her to espionage. Love? That was a cinema cliché. More likely, based on the Frenchwomen he’d met, a deep intellectual motivation, or revenge. There were too many ways Elisa could have lost her voice during the last World War.

Elisa got down to their shared business immediately. She showed him the creature’s food (which looked better than her own). She let Dimitri sample the tap water (it was passable, just). When he dared to ask for confirmation of her plans, Elisa offered up a firm calendar date for the creature’s transport to the docks. Would it truly be released? If not, as long as the creature stayed in Elisa’s care, Dimitri felt that was better than any other alternative. Including, the way events had proceeded, his people: the Russians.

Next, Elisa escorted Dimitri into her bathroom, now taken over by the creature. This circumstance would peeve any woman he’d known, French or not. Despite this, Elisa smiled most brightly as she opened the door.

It was startling to see the creature lounging in a regular bathtub. It seemed far more human. The tub, while generous, was small for the creature. Like the water quality, this would lead to trouble over the long term. It might already be a problem now. Going closer, Dimitri thought that the magnificent water-being’s color could be better. It had lost some vividness in its teal and gold markings.  “Hello,” he tried. “Do you remember me?” The creature hunched its shoulders. Its gills half-lifted. There was a deep _harrumph_.

Dimitri took our a scientific instrument. To Elisa, he said, “I would like to check the water, if I may.” From the tub, a sustained hiss deepened into a growl. Dimitri froze. 

The creature stood slowly, water surging off it, its growl deepening. Its full anger display unfurled as it towered – and there were no chains, here, to hold it back. Dimitri backed out immediately. He was remembered. If the creature was acting like that, and moving on from here soon, it seemed strong enough. Elisa slid in between him and the creature, hands extended towards it.

Before Dimitri could pull her to safety, someone spoke behind them. “Everything all right – oh.”

Dimitri whirled around. An older man, pale as Dimitri was himself, was standing there. Elisa made hand-signals at him. This man said, “Elisa said you were coming. How about you come over to my place next door? Elisa says she’ll stay here with our, ah, friend.” Dimitri felt very dubious about this, but the creature was still making uncanny noises. Elisa was waving him out, making more hand signals.

“She’s saying thank you again,” said his new host. "With some apologies on behalf of our friend."

Manners brought Dimitri back to himself. "I believe I am the one who owes it some apologies. Madame: thank _you_ again." With a final half-bow to Elisa, he followed the other man. The moment he left, the creature's noise was subsumed by the cinema sounds and the phonograph.

Ten steps away, in the apartment next door, Dimitri looked around. Incredible disorder was only excused by the place being an artist’s studio, full of sketches and works in progress. Dimitri had glimpsed his host, briefly, during the extraction. This man had helped Elisa. At the time, he had seemed some years older. But there was a toupée on display, resting rakishly on a bust of Apollo. The rest of this man's ageing makeup was probably hidden in plain sight, amongst his artist’s materials.

A cat strolled over, meowed like a rusty hinge, and flopped at Dimitri’s feet. Charmed, he knelt down and trilled _myaooo_ , then went white. Was that how Americans talked to cats? His masters had trained Dimitri to do difficult things, to kill a man with one injection, to survive Thanksgiving, not this.

His artist host was paying little attention. “Can I tempt you with a sherry?” Not French, this one, but the sort they would hire. The French knew how to live.

“No thank you,” Dimitri replied. “Simply some water.” Always flavorless, adaptable. Safe.

The artist nipped off to one side. Dimitri looked around some more. The disorder was less irritating than messes usually were, he realized. The space was layered with books upon artworks upon papers, all with a patina of time. Dmitri was reminded of his family’s study and the school libraries where he’d learned to love science. All lost to half a lifetime of war: with Germany, with America. 

His host brought water for two. They sat together on the one divan. The artist said, “Got a little lint on you, there. Do you mind – ” A swatch of cat fur was plucked from Dimitri’s coat.

“Ah! Thank you. You, as well, may I?” Dimitri flicked away another tuft of cat fur from the artist’s knee.

“Better not get started with that,” said the artist, smiling. “You’ll be there all day!”

Dimitri thought that would be all right. He found in him a wish to linger in this warm bolt-hole packed with books, to tell this man his story. Something about that creature had undone him as an agent. First he’d told Elisa and Zelda his long-lost name, now this. The best way to keep one’s own silence, he knew, was to get others to speak. “You were part of the extraction. For...as you say, our friend?”

“Oh, well, we were both there. I helped a little,” the artist said, diffidently. "Between you and me, it was very last minute."

That made a certain sense. Still, Dimitri remembered the artist's inspired driving, distracting Strickand by ripping the bumper off his new Cadillac. “Excellent work!" Dimitri raised his glass. They clinked, a temperate toast. The water tasted the same as it did next door, drawn from Elisa’s tap. He relaxed more. “You, I see, are art; I am science; and your friend?”

“She’s very brave,” the artist said.  Dimitri nodded in agreement. “You’re a doctor?”

“A scientist. Astrobiology is my passion,” he said, simply. “The creature will probably be all right for another few days. I envy you, spending more time with this being between two worlds, air and water. Has it done anything of interest?"

Self-concsiously, the artist ran a hand up one forearm, then through his hair. "Well..." At these telltales of someone holding back, Dimitri leaned forwards, meeting the artist's eyes intensely. The man blurted, "He ate one of my cats."

Dimitri jerked his hand away from the cat that had followed him to the divan. "What!"

"Started with the head. I had quite a shock, let me tell you. He was sorry, after, tried to make it up to me. That's more than I can say for most humans."

Dimitri was distracted by the first statement. "The head. How unusual! Yet he has the dentition for it, considering...perhaps he craved calcium and minerals." The artist went slightly green. Dimitri realised he might have misspoken.

Changing the subject, he said, "Your drawing there is excellent. May I take a closer look?” The artist agreed, and they both went to the board. Dimitri’s own drawings were passable, but the artist had some special magic. His drawing of the creature’s back was beautifully rendered. It showed the lines of fins and muscles far more thoughtfully than the Americans’ quick, crude photographs. Whatever the French were up to, it was going to be thorough.

“He’s really something, Charlie,” the artist said, dreamily.

“Charlie?”

The artist’s cheeks flushed. “That's what I call him. After an old-time silent actor. To myself, mind you.” He gestured at the creature's portrait on his drafting table. “Seems, well, friendlier, if he’s got a name.”

“You are very right,” Dimitri said, regretfully. It was one of the things he should have insisted on in the government laboratories, from the beginning. He changed the subject from his own shortcomings by returning to the artwork. “It’s a marvelous likeness of...him. I see you are a classicist.”

“Is that what the kids are calling it,” the artist chuckled. Behind his glasses, his eyes creased, warmed. “Beats behind the times. I could do a sketch of you, if you wanted?”

Dmitri smiled colorlessly. If this was a code phrase, agent to agent, he’d failed it. If it wasn’t, the last thing he wanted was a record of his presence. “I have intruded on your time. And you have certainly been inconvenienced. I should probably go. Please give…Elisa…my regards and thanks. It is perhaps best that I – ”

“Leave them to it,” the artist finished, with a nod of withdrawn agreement. "Well. It was nice to talk."

They went out. In the hallway, two kinds of music blended, Elisa’s phonograph and the cinema below. Her door remained firmly shut. Elisa’s professional coolness did not bother him. This man’s subtle withdrawal did. “For me, as well. Good to talk." Dimitri shifted from foot to foot. "Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

It was not enough. Dimitri reached out to shake hands. The artist responded, wrapping both his hands around Dimitri’s. On the spur of the moment, Dimitri leaned in and kissed the man on each cheek, European style. His host received the pleasantry with such shock that it confirmed he was American. Yet as Dimitri headed down that peeling hallway to the staircase outside, the artist touched one cheekbone, bemused. As Dimitri reached the end of the hallway, the artist recovered to shout, “Come back any time!”

It wasn’t likely. Dimitri’s extraction orders, received at last, were heavy in his mind. All he could do was lift a hand in farewell, leaving a good man behind.


End file.
